While many of the worthies in the New Media and elsewhere are justly concerned with who won and who lost in the Israel / Lebanon mini-war, we can’t get the English airport plot out of our thoughts. We think this plot may have done some serious harm to the cause of Islamic fascism.

People may find themselves somewhat interested in who Hezbollah is and what they are doing; they may also be on various sides of the issue, given the inverted moral pyramid of so much of the West today. However they feel about that somewhat abstract issue, people really do not want to feel threatened on airplanes. That focuses the mind on Islamic terror in an immediate way; the story about the would-be woman bomber with the baby makes it all the more disgusting, and makes the enemiy’s evil more tangible.

But it’s not evil that is the key to the problem that radical Muslims have created for themselves — it is the fact that they have annoyed and inconvenienced millions of people and their families, going about their summer business or vacations. Who do you think all those travelers waiting for two hours in line are going to blame for their inconvenience? Who do you think they will blame when their lipsticks and lattes and dime novels and iPods are taken away in Heathrow? Who gets the blame for everyone’s having seen grandpa’s Depends in that clear plastic bag?

And now there’s talk in Britain of specifically profiling Muslims, whose co-religionists, after all, comprised a rather compelling 100% of the threat. The Times of London:

The passenger-profiling technique involves selecting people who are behaving suspiciously, have an unusual travel pattern or, most controversially, have a certain ethnic or religious background.

The system would be much more sophisticated than simply picking out young men of Asian appearance. But it would cause outrage in the Muslim community because its members would be far more likely to be selected for extra checks.

Officials at the Department for Transport….say that it would greatly reduce queues at security gates, which caused lengthy delays at London airports yesterday for the fifth day running. Heathrow and Gatwick were worst affected, cancelling 69 and 27 flights respectively. BAA gave warning yesterday that the disruption would continue for the rest of the week.

It is likely that there will be a tremendous political row about this, in our opinion, but that does not seem to us a smart move on the part of Islamic organizations. People may not be willing to put up with two-hour security checks and massively cancelled and delayed flights to assuage the sensitivities of a portion of two percent to possibly three percent of the population, no matter how much the BBC and the Muslim Council of Britain lecture and hector them. If the authorities do cave in and inconvenience the entire traveling public, look for resentment to grow further.

We would prefer that people react strongly to the evil embodied by the young brownshirts and their creepy imam mentors. But we’ll settle for people reacting strongly to the annoyance and inconvenience they cause. In today’s upside-down world, you take what you can get.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 6:25 pm and is filed under General, Iran, MSM, Religion, War, business, radical chic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.